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Bonding through Context: Language and interactional alignment in Japanese situated discourse
Edited by Risako Ide and Kaori Hata
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 314] 2020
► pp. 123–144

Chapter 6
Confronting the EU referendum as immigrants

How ‘bonding/un-bonding’ works in narratives of Japanese women living in the UK

| Osaka University

This paper focuses on how immigrant Japanese women living in London categorise themselves in interviews conducted yearly from 2016 to 2019. Through analyses of participants’ personal narratives as immigrants and their relationships with their husbands’ relatives, I investigate (a) how they position themselves in the post-referendum social order; (b) how their positioning has changed over the three-year period; and (c) how their positioning is negotiated with other participants during the course of a group interview. My analysis shows how two kinds of bonding phenomena emerge during interactions. The first, social bonding, is a discursive, ideological practice to connect the self to social groups, whereas the second, interactional bonding, refers to communicative developments participants create.

Keywords: Japanese immigrants, positioning, small stories, self-reference terms, categorization
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
  • 3.Data
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1From the 2016 narrative: Self-categorisations
    • 4.2From the 2017 narrative: An ‘immigrant’ is an ‘immigrant’: Narratives as victims or quasi-victims of discrimination
      • 4.2.1Talking about their relationships with their husbands’ relatives
      • 4.2.2Quoting the narratives of others
      • 4.2.3Converging on an ideology and resonance in the interactional space
    • 4.3From the 2018 narrative: Re-forming their social bond
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 3 December 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.314.06hat
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